Do Not Be Vengeful: Let Hurt and Anger Go Through You

He who conquers the mind, conquers the world.    -Guru Nanak Dev

In today’s economy, a lot of people are losing their jobs.  People are being fired and let go from companies at an alarming rate.  There is a huge sense of betrayal people feel when they lose a job.  People are incredibly angry at their employers and often life itself.  There is also a tendency for people who feel they have been wronged to want to “lash out” at their employers who have fired them.  Many of these people become angry, not just at the employer where they have lost their job, but at all employers.  They take on [Read more]

Carrot Peelers, Sales, Personality and Your Job Search

A couple of years ago, I started seeing a bunch of articles in Vanity Fair,the New York Times, The Village Voice and other publications about a guy named Joe Andes. Here is a portion of one profile of him from the May 2006 Vanity Fair:

In the early 90s a man named Joe Andes began showing up in the bar at the Pierre, Manhattan’s famously posh hotel on the corner of Fifth Avenue and East 61st Street. Joe liked the crowd at the Café Pierre, but the real draw for him was Kathleen Landis, the dimpled, piano-playing house chanteuse who still entertains there five nights a week. Joe was a five-nights-a-week man as well, always seated at the same round table with a front view of the baby grand and a back view of Landis. He drank only champagne, and never alone. His usual brand was Veuve Clicquot. On most nights he casually ordered a bottle, which always appeared with two champagne glasses—one for himself, the other for Landis. Even by the standards of café society, Joe cut a noticeably soigné figure in his classic, British-made Chester Barrie suits and bold shirts and ties from Turnbull & Asser. The clothes went well with his English accent and late-period Sean Connery salt-and-pepper beard. He looked so distinguished and was so free with the bubbly that the Café Pierre crowd, Landis included, at first had him pegged as one of the “owners”—the tycoons who actually live at the Pierre in stupendously high-end co-op apartments. The Café Pierre was way off about Joe, or so it decided after some probing. If no one was brave enough to ask him where he lived, quite a few people asked him what he did for a living. Holding his glass of champagne by the stem, Joe would say simply, “I sell potato peelers.” The probers had a good chuckle over that. “Right,” they all said. “Now pull the other one.” … Joe pushes his gear through the streets on a hand truck, which he in his English way calls a trolley. He and the trolley are often stopped by strangers ready with a heartfelt line: “Sir, you’re the greatest salesman in New York!”

The reason so many magazines and publications were paying so much attention to Joe was because he is someone who was able to make a great living selling carrot peelers on the street. When Joe died a few years later, publications all around the world ran obituaries about him. [Read more]

Alpha Pygmy Goats, Unreasonably Optimistic Russian Attorneys and Setting High Expectations for Yourself

I used to be a law professor, and I remember in my class there was the nicest kid you can imagine who had immigrated from Russia a few years previously and wanted to be an attorney.  He hardly spoke English and had a difficult time putting sentences together, however, none of this appeared to matter.  He was always the first guy who arrived in class each day and always stayed after to ask questions.  During class, he took notes and wrote furiously.  He sat in the front row and appeared to believe that he was going to be the greatest attorney of all time.  He wore a suit to class each day and other kids were showing up to class in shorts, tee shirts and flip flops.  All of the kids in the class liked him a lot, and they respected him a lot. Each day after class, he would approach me and ask me questions about ridiculously prestigious law firms and whether or not I thought he could get a job with these firms.  I never had the heart to tell him that it would be impossible for him to get a job with most of these law firms due to where he was attending law school and his ability to speak English.  He did not seem to care, however.  For as long as I could take it each day, he would sit there and question me about various law firms and then, from time to time, also ask me questions about the material. When the semester was over, I continued to hear from [Read more]

How to Manage Crisis

One of the scariest things for any of us is when we are in crisis.  A crisis can be defined a lot of ways.  It can be:

• the loss of a job.
• a divorce.
• a traumatic injury.
• a death.
• the alienation of a loved one due to a fight or disagreement.
• a severe illness.
• or even your own impending death.

Crisis is absolutely one of the most challenging things that we face, and when many people are in crisis they simply cannot cope and therefore fall apart. The key to managing any crisis is to look towards the future while you’re inside the crisis.  You [Read more]

You Need to Be Able to Close

The ability to ‘‘close’‘ and get the sale is the most important skill in selling. It is something that few people know how to do. Many people can get a consumer, an employer, or others to the cusp of making a purchasing or a hiring decision; however, it is the final ‘‘push’‘ that makes all of the difference. It takes a tremendous amount of skill to sell yourself and get a job. It takes a tremendous amount of skill to go from someone who a potential employer will consider for the job to someone who is hired. Your job in getting hired, in getting a better job and when looking for a job, is to push the employer over the fence and make them hire you. This is all there is to it. You need to get hired. There is nothing wrong with developing the skills of a master salesperson and ‘‘closer’‘ in order to get the best job you can. The desire to get a good job and ‘‘close’‘ the deal is a desire for employment, which leads to a richer and more abundant life and the desire to better yourself is praiseworthy. If you do not desire to have a better job or to find a job when you are unemployed, you are not living up to your full potential. It is absolutely essential that you give your best efforts to ‘‘closing’‘ and [Read more]

Winning in Your Job Search and Life Means Going Forward No Matter What Criticism You Think You May Receive

Every day when I sit down to work in the morning and turn on my computer, I generally receive several emails and comments about the companies I am running and also, for what it is worth, me personally.

• Some people will write me an email telling me I am the stupidest person they have ever encountered.
• Other people will say something very positive and will tell me how something I have done has benefited them and thank me for this.
• Some people will write me an email telling me they hate a company I am running.
• Some people will write and enclose pictures of their family and tell me I have changed their lives through something one of my companies has done.
• Some people will post a comment on one of our websites saying they love a company I am running.
• Some people will write me psychotic emails that insult me and my family.
• Other people will write emails telling me that the advice I have given them helped their family.

In addition to stuff that appears simply on my desk, out in the world the same thing is occurring. There are people who are going onto forums and talking about how much they love me [Read more]

In Defense of Long-Term Employment With a Single Employer

If you go into any business that has been around more than twenty or thirty years, you will inevitably find a handful of people who have been there from the very beginning of their careers. These well adjusted souls will typically report to work each day at a similar time and have managed to be the only ones presumably left in the organization after generation upon generation of people coming and going. Many people do last for decades in the same organization and there are characteristics which uniformly seem to characterize these sorts of people. While I [Read more]

Your Beliefs About Yourself are Controlling Your Destiny

When you go down any street in virtually any major urban environment in the world,  you will see people living on the street. I have lived in Europe, Asia, and all over the United States and wherever I have gone, I have seen people living on the street in various parts of these cities. The only place I can honestly say I have not seen this is in rural Ohio, where several members of my family live surrounded by miles of corn fields. Perhaps homeless people live in the corn fields there, I do not know. Who [Read more]

Find an Employer With Similar Values

In 1997, I was working for a federal judge in Bay City, Michigan. It was cold and I was working in a rural area that left a lot to be desired. Even the judge I worked for got the hell out of there when he could go to another part of Michigan. While the judge I worked for was a very nice person, the atmosphere had a certain inescapable formality. The way I was required to dress for work each day and other rituals that permeated the work reflected this. There were also some cultural differences that made it clear to me [Read more]

My Lesson From the Missionaries

Several years ago, I was working at a law firm and virtually from the moment I arrived a woman I’ll call “Linda” used to come into my office for a few hours a day to talk. Her topic? How bad things were at the law firm. She would share one rumor after the other about how many bad things were going on at the law firm. I was treated to information about allegedly corrupt activities, affairs, who did not like who, incredible insights into who was about to be fired, what different people had said to her, and [Read more]

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